Google Answers
Nik: In the mid-2000s, Google offered a pay-for-search feature where you could post questions that people could bid on. You'd choose a bid and then pay a small fee for someone to research your question that a normal Google Search would not return results for. What was this service called? Are there any archives of it?
ChatGPT4: The service you are referring to is called Google Answers. It was launched in 2002 and was discontinued in 2006.
Google Answers was a platform where users could ask questions and set a price they were willing to pay for an answer. Researchers, called "Google Answers Researchers," could then choose to answer the question and earn the designated fee. The service was meant to provide users with more in-depth, personalized answers to their queries.
There are archives of some of the questions and answers that were posted on Google Answers. You can find them at various websites, such as the Google Answers Archive and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. However, the ability to ask new questions or receive answers through the service is no longer available.
I was thinking of building a music player app, or a plug-in for an existing music player app that would announce the name of the song based on the file name, or the title, if it was embedded in the metadata. I think I asked Google Answers "Is there any app that reads the name of the file to you?"
There were some ambiguity about what I meant. I meant if the app read the file-same or song title aloud, but without being explicit about that, the Answerer was like "All Music players read the song title and then display it". I didn't mean read it in terms of an IO sense, I think "read to me" is understood to mean "read aloud", however the Answerer I paid $5 to pushed back but confirmed there was nothing on the market that did that. I ended up writing a script in C# that would take an MP3 file like Aerosmith_dream_on.mp3 and generate a small audio file titled Aerosmith_dream_on_DJ.mp3 which would just say "That was Dream On by Aerosmith" and then as long as I played the songs in alphabetical order, I would hear the little DJ clip after the real song. It all went away with Spotify, but it was fun at the time.